The Black Tide (39 page)

‘The tanker will be there. I’m sure it will.’ There was a long pause, then she said, ‘It’s Daddy you’re worried about, isn’t it?’ He didn’t answer and after a while she said, ‘You’re thinking of suicide, is that it? D’you think he might – do you think he really might?’

‘My God!’ His voice sounded shocked. ‘The way you put it into words.
You’re thinking of suicide –
just like that, and your voice so bloody matter-of-fact.’

‘You’ve been skating around it.’ Her tone was sharp and pitched high. ‘You know you have, ever since you brought up the question of what we’ll find when we get to the island. If Trevor’s wrong and our tanker doesn’t turn up, if nothing happens to prove that the two of them are still afloat, then the money we lose – that’s everything, the house, this boat, all Mother’s jewellery, her clothes even – it will be nothing to the damage Daddy will suffer … all his friends, his whole world. At his age he can’t start again. He’d never be able to at Lloyd’s anyway. You can’t make a come-back when everybody knows you cost your Names just about every penny they possess. Do you think I don’t know this? I’ve been living with it for the last month or more, knowing that for him it’d be the end of the world. I don’t think he’d want to go on living after that. But whether he’d go as far as to take his own life …’

‘I’m sorry, Pam. I didn’t realize.’

She seemed to ignore that, for she went on almost as though he hadn’t spoken: ‘And don’t start hitting out at Trevor without stopping to think what it’s like to see your wife burn herself up in an attempt to save some seagulls. Or at me either. I may have hung out some flags as you put it, but what have you done, or Salty, any of us? He found the tanker and though he wasn’t doing it for us—’ There was a crash and I heard her say, ‘Bugger! That’s my hat gone overboard.’ There was a stamp of feet on deck, the sound of sails flapping. A few minutes later the girl’s figure slipped past me as she went to her quarters up for’ard.

I woke to the smell of bacon frying, the sun already
burning up the dawn clouds. A haze developed as the morning wore on, the sun very hot and Pamela dressed in shorts with a loose-tailed shirt reading a book on the foredeck in the shadow of the spinnaker. It wasn’t until after lunch that we began to detect a smudge like a tiny cloud growing on the horizon. It was straight over the bows and couldn’t be anything else but Selvagem Grande. It grew steadily in size, and though our eyes were constantly searching, there was no satellite smudge that could represent the tanker.

By 15.00 we could see the island quite clearly and had altered course to pass to the north of it. It was a sort of Table Mountain in miniature, the highest point 597 feet according to the Admiralty pilot, and cliffs rising sheer to 400 feet. These cliffs formed an unbroken line, heavily undercut and edged white by the breaking swell, their flat tops arid and desolate with a cap of black basalt sitting on the red sandstone like chocolate on a layer cake. No tree anywhere, no sign of vegetation, just the two layers of rock with a new light structure perched like a white pimple on the summit of one of the basalt
picos
.

The wind was backing into the north and for a time we were busy handling the spinnaker and setting a working genoa. It was blowing force 3 or 4 by the time we got everything stowed and by then we were close off the northern end of the island with no sign of any other vessel. There was still a chance that the tanker was hidden from us by the southern part of the island, but our hopes faded as we rounded Punto do Risco and began to run down the western side. There were plenty of shearwaters, which is the main reason the Portuguese government declared the island a nature reserve, but otherwise the place looked totally lifeless. There were some shacks by the landing place on the south-western side and a roped pathway climbed steeply to the lighthouse, but apart from that, the only sign of any human presence was the mass of Communist slogans painted on the rocks. This ugly display of giant graffiti had presumably been put there by fishermen who had been ardent supporters of the revolution.

Off the landing place we turned back on to our original
course, heading for Selvagem Pequena ten miles away. This is quite a different sort of island, being little more than an above-water reef, but with the wind increasing we could soon make out the white of waves breaking on the horizon. By sunset the remains of the wrecked tanker were visible and we could see right across the island to where waves were breaking on the smaller reef island of Fora a mile or so to the west. From Fora a chain of above-water rocks six to twelve feet high extended several miles to the north. This was the Restinga do Ilheu de Fora, but there was no tanker waiting there, and with visibility now vastly improved, we could see there wasn’t even a fishing vessel anywhere within a radius of a dozen miles of us. We were the only vessel afloat in the neighbourhood of the Selvagen Archipelago.

Once this had sunk in we felt suddenly very lonely. The islands had an atmosphere of their own. If there was any place at sea that could be described as unfriendly I felt this was it and I found myself remembering that word
spooky
. It was a strange word to use about a group of islands, but now that I was among them I knew it described their atmosphere exactly. They were spooky and I wondered how long Saltley would be willing to hang around them waiting for a tanker that might never turn up.

I voiced my misgivings that evening, not in front of the others, but to Saltley alone. We had had an excellent meal hove-to on the starb’d tack four miles to the east of Selvagem Pequena, the light on the main island just visible over the bows. I took him up on deck on some pretext or other and told him bluntly that I’d no real confidence in the conclusion we had reached. ‘I’m not even sure Choffel used the word salvage. It sounded like it, that’s all. If you remember, I made that quite clear.’

He nodded. ‘Understood. But Mike and I didn’t come to the same conclusion solely on the basis of what you had told me. We worked it out for ourselves. Unless they were going to operate independently, they’d want to rendezvous as near the target as possible.’

‘It doesn’t have to be an island,’ I said. ‘There’s all the mainland coast, or better still a fixed position out at sea.’

He shook his head. ‘The mainland would be too risky, but we did give a lot of thought to a sight-fixed rendezvous. It’s what you or I would choose. But we’re navigators. Terrorists tend to be urban creatures. They wouldn’t trust a rendezvous that was arrived at by using a sextant and tables stuffed with figures. They’d want a fixed point they could see.’ We were in the bows then and he had his hands in his pockets, balancing himself easily to the plunging movement of the ship. ‘You picked on the Selvagens, so did we, and the more we thought about it, the more ideal they appeared. And now I’ve seen them—’ He turned his head to port, staring westward to where the sound of the seas pounding Selvagem Pequena came to us as a continuous deep murmur. ‘No ship’s captain wants to tangle with that lot. They give this group a wide berth, and the silly idiot who ran his vessel on to the rocks there only goes to make the point that it’s a bloody dangerous place.’ He turned then, walking slowly back towards the empty cockpit lit by the faint glow of the lights below. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Our friend will turn up. I’m sure of it.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But probably not tomorrow or the next day or the next – just how long are you prepared to hang around here?’

‘For three weeks if necessary,’ he said. And when I asked him if we’d got enough food on board, he answered curtly, ‘If we have to stay that long, it’s water, not food, will be the problem.’

I thought it might be the humans, too, for the prospect of hanging around these godforsaken islands for three weeks appalled me. But, as his words indicated, we were committed now and no point in leaving until we were absolutely sure this wasn’t the meeting place.

That night it came on to blow. Even though we were hove-to there was a lot of movement and the noise of the wind in the rigging and waves breaking made it difficult to sleep. Saltley seemed to be up and about most of the night checking our position against the light on Selvagem Grande and some time in the early hours, at the change of the watch I think, the ship was put about with a great crashing of gear
and slatting of sails, feet pounding on the deck and somebody shouting to run her off as the jib sheet was caught up on the winch. All this I heard as in a dream, clinging to my bunk, not wishing to be roused from the half-sleep in which I lay. A cold wind came down through the open hatch and when, after running for some minutes, they turned about again, bows into the wind and hove-to, I distinctly heard Mark call out, ‘The light’s gone.’ And a moment later – ‘It’s raining. I can’t see a bloody thing.’ As I fell back into slumber again, I was thinking of the red painted slogans on the rocks and the waves breaking over the Pequena and Fora reefs, hoping to God Saltley knew his stuff as an inshore navigator.

The next thing I knew the first grey light of a dismal dawn was filtering into the saloon. Toni Bartello was shaking me violently. ‘We’re reefing. Get up please.’ And as I stirred he yelled in my ear – ‘Oilskins and seaboots. There’s a lot of water in the cockpit and it’s raining like hell.’

It was a foul morning, the wind near gale force and poor visibility. I have seen plenty of rough seas, but it’s one thing to observe them from high up in the closed-in comfort of a big ship’s wheelhouse, quite another to face steep breaking waves virtually from sea level. Saltley told me to take the wheel while the rest of them, all except Pamela who was still fast asleep, reefed the main and then changed down to storm jib, and all the time the crash of seas bursting against the hull, spray flying across the deck and everything banging and slatting as the boat bucked and rolled and the wind came in blustering gusts.

‘Where are the islands?’ I yelled to Saltley as he half fell into the cockpit. We were hove-to again and nothing visible except a bleak circle of storm-tossed water and grey scudding clouds.

‘Over there,’ he yelled, putting on his harness and making a vague gesture towards the porthand shrouds.

All that day we only saw them once, but that once was enough to scare us badly, for we suddenly saw heavy breaking seas quite close on the starb’d bow and as we put about, I caught a glimpse of that wrecked tanker’s superstructure, a
dim ghost of a shape seen through a blur of rain and spray. After that Saltley took no chances and we ran south for a good hour before turning and heaving-to again.

Later the rain eased and the wind dropped, but we had been badly frightened and even when there were no more clouds and the stars paling to the brightness of the young moon, we still kept to two-man watches. Dawn broke with high peaks aflame in the east as the sun rose firing the edges of old storm clouds. No sign of the islands, no ship of any sort in sight, the sea gently heaving and empty to the horizon in every direction.

Fortunately we were able to get sun sights and fix our position. We were some twenty miles east south-east of Selvagem Pequena. We had already shaken out the reefs and now we set the light-weight genoa. The contrast was unbelievable, the ship slipping fast through the water, the sea almost flat calm and the decks dry, not a drop of spray coming aboard.

Saltley took the opportunity to check his camera. It was a good one with several lenses, including a 300 mm. telephoto lens. He also took from his briefcase some official GODCO pictures of both the
Howdo Stranger
and the
Aurora B
. He asked us to study them carefully so that if our tankers turned up, however brief the sighting, we’d still be able to identify them. Later he put them in the top drawer of the chart table so that if we needed to check any detail they’d be ready to hand.

It was the middle of the afternoon before we raised Selvagem Grande. We sailed all round it and then down to Pequena and Fora. No tanker, nothing, the wind falling very light, the sea almost a flat calm with ripples that caught the slanting sun in reflected dazzles of blinding light. It was quite hot and towards dusk a haze developed. This thickened during the evening till it was more a sea fog, so that we had another worrying night with no sign of the light on Selvagem Grande and no stars and the moon no more than a ghostly glimmer of opaque light.

In the end we turned eastward, sailing for three hours on a course of 90°, going about and sailing a reciprocal three
hours on 270°. We did that twice during the course of the night and when dawn came there was still the same thick clammy mist and nothing visible.

We were making towards Selvagem Grande then and by the time breakfast was over and everything washed up and stowed, the sun was beginning to burn up the mist and just visible as a golden disc hung in a golden glow. Water dripped in rainbow drops from the gold-painted metal of the main boom and the only sound on deck was the tinkling gurgle of water slipping past the hull.

Shortly after 10.00 I handed the wheel over to Pamela. Saltley was dozing in his bunk, which was the starb’d quarter berth aft of the chart table, and Toni and Mark were up in the bows servicing the snap-shackle end of the masthead spinnaker hoist which was showing signs of chafe. I paid a visit to the heads, had a shave and then began checking Saltley’s DR position. I was just measuring off the distance run on each course during the night when Pamela called down to ask me how far off the island was supposed to be?

‘According to the dead reckoning at ten o’clock approximately nine miles,’ I said. ‘Why – can you see it?’

‘I think so.’

‘Speed through the water?’ I asked.

She checked the electric log and reported 4.7 knots. We had covered perhaps 2½ miles since the last log entry. ‘I’ve lost it now,’ she called down. ‘The mist comes and goes.’

I dived up into the cockpit then, for if she really had seen the island it must be a lot closer than Saltley’s dead reckoning indicated. The sun’s pale disc was barely visible, the mist iridescent and so full of light it hurt the eyes. Visibility was little more than a mile. She pointed away to port. ‘The bearing was about two-thirty.’